One of the clearest
illustrations of “brain gain” in Poland comes from the southern city of Krakow which is experiencing a mini-boom in
information technology – at a time when much of Europe’s tech scene is in a windless ocean.

The global reverse migration – turning brain drain to brain gain
in many countries – is obvious here: Some 70 IT and multinational firms have
opened, employing 20,000 skilled workers – Poles and foreigners alike.Cisco opened in May, and its 90-person
staff will soon climb to 500. Googlemoved an R&D office here. State Street, Capgemeni
and Lufthansa, Shell, Brown
Brothers, and Philip Morris, to name a
few, are all present.

The hopeful call
Krakow a small Silicon Valley of Central Europe. And the buzz here is a magnet
for brain gain: It’s a small oasis of Polish bohemia with 14 colleges and
universities, and a bar-arts-and-film scene, and – not destroyed like Warsaw in World War II – it retains its
Austro-Hungarian architectural charm.

In reporting for The
Christian Science Monitor’s “brain gain” project, I met a cluster of young and
bright reverse migrants here in a translucent glass-and-steel tech-park.
Recent-hires at the British firm Element14, an online interface provider for
electronic parts sales, they are part of the vanguard of Poland’s brain gain.
Their profiles tell as much about this city’s bright future as the vibrant draw
it is at the moment.

Jaroslaw Grabon, a
software engineer, was born in Poland, but his family moved to Germany. Now, in an admittedly “wrenching”
decision, he’s come back to Krakow, leaving a flat and friends in Munich. He says he got a call from a Krakow
headhunter for Shell, and decided, out of curiosity and interest in the
country, to move back.

“I felt better in
Poland than Germany in ways I can’t easily explain, but it was a big decision.
I left the whole family. I sent out 120 CVs and got 80 positive replies.Gdansk was a possibility but I decided on
Shell. Then moved here [to Element14].”

Tomasz Wasilewski
worked in Warsaw for a Silicon Valley firm that employed many people like him,
offspring of émigré Poles who went abroad earlier. But he was sold on Krakow
and moved here, partly because of the Krakow buzz and partly for the
experience.

A young Finnish woman,
Marianne Kuukkanen, arrived this year and says that the city’s multicultural
environment requires looking “more closely at oneself, and I think this has
made me more efficient and aware at my job and with others.”

They report that the
multicultural work environment, the new business models being employed, and the
need to stay current in tech developments pipe a new and different mentality
into Krakow.

“Everyone who is here
can move somewhere else if they want, to any other site. We are not bound by
nationality. Poles who return have a much bigger influence than elsewhere and
they know this. It is a factor in their choice. Because it is a smaller
setting,” says Wojciech Burkot, of his hometown, Krakow. He, himself, is a part
of the Krakow buzz as head of Google’s R&D unit here, a reverse IT migrant
who came home after years abroad to wrestling with increasing Google’s search
engine speed.

The Krakow setting is
key to drawing “people smarter than us that [keep] the company growing … and
improving, says Mr. Burkot.

“It’s all city, city, city,” says Ramon
Tancinco, head of strategy and business development in central Europe for
Cisco. He spent two years on a team deciding where to locate the office, and
landed on Krakow. “We look at regions not countries, and Krakow is at an
East-West corridor and in a stable EU country. When you bake in the student
population, that’s very strong.”

Indeed, the area is
low income and high education – some 400,000 students live in the corridor
between Krakow and Wroclaw – giving it
a dense population base that overseas firms call “sustainable advantage.” And
the city’s old square with its 11th and 14th century churches and charms and
endless cafes are not lost on firms. For example, Kazimierz, the old Jewish
quarter made famous in the film Schindler’s List, is rid of its postwar
thuggish character and is a cultural center.

The city’s
international draw, too, is key, says Elaine Barnes, a senior manager at
Element14. “We need 23 languages in one city. English is the business language,
German is No. 2. We looked at Hungary and Finland, Sweden, and Poland. The Czech Republic. We couldn’t find the breadth
of language anywhere else [but Krakow].”

The ferment of brain
gain among European youth and IT wonks and mavens may be in the air. Yet – like
visiting any school classroom to “see” education – it is often difficult to
instantly quantify something as amorphous as “brain gain” taking place.

Google’s Burkot
suggests that brain gain is “incremental in Poland.”

His colleague Tancinco
thinks he sees it, though. “The empirical evidence of gain in Krakow is that
when I came here four years ago there was one venture capitalist. Now there are
six or seven. That is a barometer. Venture capitalists need to see a talent
pool of emerging firms with good ideas or they won’t come. You need to see an
incubation, a pool of start ups to be the next ‘whatever.’ ”

And, another plus for
Krakow’s continued boom is that hasn’t recorded the corporate horror stories
heard nearby out of Ukraine or Russia. There is less mafia and corruption.
“Go east of here and it is a wilder ride,” says one analyst.

“There is no support
for gangsters here, I’ve never been shaken down or been told to give a bribe,”
says Richard Lucas, a British citizen who owns 11 companies in Krakow and has
been here 21 years.

One bit of learning
gained by Mr. Wasilewski, who moved from Warsaw (Poles may seek work overseas
but are often reticent to move internally) to Krakow, is about practice. He
assumed there was a set of general rules applicable everywhere in the industry
he works. But he found out differently.

The US firm he worked for in Warsaw stressed
getting jobs done simply. “They wanted us not to make work complicated by
adding structure, but to be efficient and nice to the customer. The focus on
being direct and pleasant was a big thing to learn,” he says. “That was
new."

“But they have a
different way of resolving client problems than the European firm I work with
now. The Americans wanted me to be a buffer, to dissolve problems. But this
European firm wants client problems reported directly to the front line. They
say, ‘put us in direct touch, don’t filter.’”

Tancinco from Cisco
suggests that Krakow’s advantages are growing geometrically as hires from
abroad accumulate here. The bulk of new hires “spent time overseas,” he says,
and they add breadth to local know-how and an intangible element that allows
them to be effective in a multinational company.

“With a broader
perspective, you learn to work around problems, not to take ‘no,’ or to treat
petty issues as final … [whereas] working around problems is more difficult if
you don’t have a broader view.”

He adds a caveat:
“What I haven’t yet seen are professors starting companies. At MIT, everyone has a side
business. In Poland, it is still either-or, business or classroom. Silicon
Valley is all about ‘And.’"

2 comments:

I am a Ukrainian web graphic designer living in Krakow working world wide. Unfortunately I am bound by rules for non EU foreigners but after travelling around EU I keep coming back to Poland, Krakow in particular. I just love it here, though it did not become any IT Mecca to me, it's more like a run away from Ukraine - enough reasons to try it.

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An English blog about Krakow Startup

Hello readers, My name is Paul Chen and welcome to K’Sup. My goal is to provide you an English language based blog on the events as well as highlight some of the enterprises who are trying to get their spot on the map as well as to archive the on-going activities at the same time do some trend-spotting. I hope you will find K’Sup both informative and inspirational. The name K’Sup is a combination of K for Krakow and S for start and UP. ‘Sup is colloquial for what’s up in American slang.